This blog gets many thousands of comments every day, which is nice. Unfortunately, only about six of them are genuine comments from real people. The rest are all “spam” comments by evil robots.

Generally, I delete all the comment spam. But on this post and this post only, I’ve decided to let some of the spam comments through. I’ll only delete the links in them, and any obscene words they may contain; other than those edits, you’ll see the pure unfiltered spamminess. I’ll even reply to them, if I have something germane to add.

In a few weeks, this post could get pretty interesting.

Today marks two years since the Bloglomerate began. Here are scenes from just a few of our posts over the last year…

 

Read the rest of this entry »

For the past day or two, none of our sidebar ads are showing up! I don’t know why. It’s not just a problem with our site, and it’s not even just a Pajamas Media problem, because I’ve noticed ads aren’t appearing on any site whose ads are served by doubleclick. Like NRO, just for instance.

Maybe it’s a brower-specific problem? I’m using the Safari browser, and haven’t tried Internet Explorer. If anyone out there is using IE, can you tell me if the sidebar ads are appearing on this page?

UPDATE 1: I just noticed, Doubleclick.com and Doubleclick.net are completely inaccessible.

UPDATE 2: Weird. The Doubleclick sites aren’t down. I viewed them through Proxify.com and they came up fine. So I called my ISP (Cox Communications) and asked if they were blocking access to those sites. They said no. I also checked my router, to see if Doubleclick was being filtered there. Still no. So, for some reason, all Doubleclick content is inaccessible, but only at my house?

UPDATE 3: And now, just as mysteriously, everything works fine again. Oh, well.

I just got an e-mail, in response to a post I wrote six days ago, exposing some scam artists.

I just wanted to send out a personal THANK YOU for the article I found after googling RTI. I was considering doing this but thought it was weird that they needed my bank account info… Here I am living pay-check to pay-check and I ALMOST got swindled.

Thanks so much
[Name withheld]

You’re welcome, of course.

Okay, now what?

All of a sudden, starting sometime today, our blog sometimes colors the text white instead of black. Since the background is also white, this renders the text invisible. Swell.

It doesn’t happen all the time, maybe half. And re-loading the page usually fixes it. It’s happening on both the Mac and the PC.

I have not monkeyed with the templates or style sheets in any way. All I can figure is, it’s something to do with the embedded display ad server code, which is called from a remote location. I’ve been studying that code, trying to figure out if it’s to blame. So far, I haven’t found the problem.

If anyone has a clue, feel free to comment.

UPDATE: Thanks to eagle-eyed reader Phoebe, I found the problem! Phoebe isolated the cause by noticing that the text only turned white when a particular ad was being displayed. I found an unclosed <font color=white> tag in the code of that ad! I have sent an e-mail to the syndicate, and one supposes the problem will be fixed very shortly.

Today I took the fateful step of adding the following strings to our comments blacklist:

• .info
• hometown.aol.com
• geocities.com

To my mind, using a “.info” domain is like walking up to a bank wearing a ski mask. Sure, you might have perfectly innocent intentions, but you should not be offended if the guard locks the door.
Read the rest of this entry »